How did you get involved with campus tours?
I got involved in-between my first and second year. During the summer I decided to volunteer with orientation and through that met a couple of my current bosses. Because I was identified as being so enthusiastic about orientation they let me know when campus tours was hiring. I got the job in December of 2009, part of the way through my second year, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
The most basic responsibility is just to lead the tours. So generally you’re looking at prospective student tours, which would be high school students and their parents. We answer questions about what it’s like to be an UVic student and how we made the decision to come to the university. We also will run tours for school groups. We will do fun activities with them, like going to a biology lab or computer lab. We will occasionally do tours for perspective faculty, people that are coming in to do an interview with one of the departments. We will show them around campus before they do the interview.
Do you have a favourite thing about welcoming new students to UVic?
It’s really exciting to share your university. You get to point out your favourite parts of your daily life, encouraging students to think: This could be your future, is this going to be a good fit?
It’s really rewarding to see someone who has come on a tour with you, six months to a year later. They will show up at orientation and say, “We just decided, based on the tour, that we want to come here”. That’s a really awesome part of the job.
Can you explain why is there a new welcome center?
The idea is it brings together all of the services that new and perspective students would need. The intention is to eliminate the kind of running around that will happen if you’re dealing with anything administrative when you are new to campus. It’s really a one spot deal. We can give you directions to where you need to go, help you with your course registration, get you in touch with photo id or student awards and financial aid. It’s really bringing all that together so you don’t have to send a student all over campus.
What is it like to be involved with the UPS?
The Director of Student Affairs is one of the executive members of the course union. Part of the executive responsibilities is planning events. I’m responsible for co-coordinating our annual career night. Setting up a night where students will come in and listen to a panel discussion with a number of former UVic students.
I’m also responsible for working with students if they ever had any questions or concerns related to Political Science and they weren’t comfortable or didn’t know who to talk to. If they have a meeting with a professor that they are not comfortable with going to see alone, I can go with them. If they have any concerns for the department that they don’t want bring up, as themselves, they can bring them to me and I can go to the department. I’m kind of the go between for the students in Political science and the department.
Through that [the position as Director of Student Affairs] I am actually helping reformat our course curriculum in the next couple of years. I’m having a number of people, that are also in the course union, help me; reformatting the curriculum to make it really student friendly.